James Cameron Hates Both Marvel And DC Characters
James Cameron hates how DC and Marvel movie characters are in arrested development.
Director James Cameron has no love lost for big blockbuster Marvel and DC films that have seemingly taken the air out of the industry. The three-time Oscar director critiqued the two major superhero film franchises and their characters during an interview with The New York Times. In his critique, Cameron compared the characters of Marvel and DC to students in college and stated, “they all have relationships, but they really don’t.”
James Cameron also stated he believes many Marvel and DC characters don’t have the one core elements that “grounds us.” The superhuman strength and invulnerability appear to be too much of a stretch for the veteran director, who’s busy developing his multiple Avatar sequels. Cameron seems to have an issue with these superhuman entities lacking any real sense of realism and purpose.
He’s not the only Hollywood icon who feels this way. Francis Ford Coppola, Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese, and others have similar thoughts to Cameron about the lack of emotion and purpose in today’s modern superhero films. During an interview with Empire Magazine in 2019, Scorsese even remarked that he doesn’t consider Marvel films “cinema.” While the legendary director acknowledges the craftsmanship that goes behind creating these larger-than-life superhero films, he believed they’re not the “cinema of human beings trying to convey emotion.”
James Cameron is in an interesting situation regarding his standing with one of the companies producing the Marvel films, Disney. The mouse house has invested a lot in bringing back Cameron’s Avatar franchise and ensuring audiences remember the first film’s impact on the industry before the sequel arrives in theaters this December. The Avatar re-release was a successful endeavor by both Disney and Cameron and proved that audiences may still be interested in Pandora.
However, there is a giant elephant (or in this case, an infinity gauntlet) in the room. James Cameron’s Avatar briefly lost the number one spot on the all-time highest-grossing films chart to Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame. While Avatar did reclaim the top spot after the 2019 re-release in China, the fact that an Avengers film did catch up to Cameron’s crown jewel probably irked the veteran director.
It’s also interesting that James Cameron made these comments considering one of the stars in Avatar is also a character in a Marvel movie. Actress Zoe Saldana portrayed the warrior Gamora in James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy franchise and played a significant role in the last two Avengers films. Despite keeping very busy with Marvel, Saldana still has time to reprise her role of Neytiri for Cameron’s sci-fi adventure franchise.
While it doesn’t prove James Cameron’s viewpoints about the superhero genre wrong, it does show that actors, producers, and directors can play in box sandboxes. Plus, not every movie has to have an objective opinion. All art is subjective, and cinema is one of the greatest art forms ever created by humans.
Will James Cameron somehow top himself with the next installment of Avatar, we’ll have to wait and see. As for now, it’s just great that fans can experience multiple movie franchises at one time.
